Pakistani widow of man shot by CIA contractor killed by her father for refusing to marry

Protests against the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis in Karachi in 2011. The widow of a Pakistani man shot dead by Davis last year has been killed by her father for refusing to remarry, police said. Photo via AFP.

The widow of a Pakistani man shot dead by a CIA contractor last year in an incident that sparked a major crisis in American-Pakistani relations, was killed by her father on Monday for refusing to remarry, police said.

Zahra Faizan, 24, and her 50-year-old mother, Nabeela Shehzad, were allegedly shot dead by Mohammad Shehzad in Pakistan’s second largest city of Lahore after a family quarrel.

“The apparent motive behind the murders is a matrimonial dispute. The family had been quarrelling over the refusal of Faizan’s widow to remarry and today again they quarrelled with each other,” senior police official Sajjad Hussain Manj told AFP.

“Shehzad was very angry and opened fire at his daughter and wife,” he added.

Local police station chief Chaudhry Ishtiaq also told AFP that initial investigations suggested Shehzad, 55, had a dispute with his wife over their daughter’s remarriage.

Ishtiaq said Shehzad fled after the murders.

Zahra’s first husband, Mohammad Faizan, was one of two Pakistanis shot dead by CIA contractor Raymond Davis in Lahore in January 2011.

Davis was arrested over the killings, but set free after $2 million was paid in blood money to the families of his victims. His release was widely condemned within Pakistan.

Shehzad was father of six daughters and one son. The family moved to the middle-class neighbourhood of Johar Town from low-income Shahdara last year, police said.

Relations between Pakistan and the United States nearly collapsed last year, sparked first by the Davis killings, then the covert American raid that killed Osama bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad in May and the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in air strikes in November.

The anti-terror alliance has yet to recover. The New York Times reported on Saturday that high-level talks on ending the diplomatic deadlock ended in failure over Pakistani demands for an apology from the United States.

Pakistan is a deeply conservative country where nearly 1,000 women and girls were murdered last year for allegedly defaming their family’s honour, according to the country’s leading independent human rights group.

[Protests against the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis in Karachi in 2011. The widow of a Pakistani man shot dead by Davis last year has been killed by her father for refusing to remarry, police said. Photo via AFP.]

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